Recruitment and Student Outreach Team Wins Global Campus Innovation Award

Leonard Ridley

From left, Christina Smith and Patty Milner accept the Global Campus Lightbulb Award from Cheryl Murphy, vice provost for distance education, and Jamie Loftin, assistant vice provost for distance education administration.

The Recruitment and Student Outreach Team was awarded the Global Campus Lightbulb Award for its innovative use of the customer relationship tool Slate to organize travel documents through a recently released feature.

Cheryl Murphy, vice provost for distance education, handed the award to Patty Milner, team director, and Christina Smith, Milner's assistant, at an October staff meeting.

"The recruitment team found a more efficient system for documenting business travel expenses," Murphy said. "With the process streamlined, staff on the recruitment and financial affairs teams can devote more time to other tasks."

The team attended 103 recruitment events across the nation in Academic Year 2018-19, including career fairs, conferences, conventions, and community college transfer fairs. Team members use Slate to track and stay in touch with prospective online students who attended recruitment events or completed website forms to gain information about online programs.

Award winners adapted a new Slate feature to capture their complex travel documentation.

"Patty and Christina are using the new Slate tool to streamline the process of retaining and organizing the many travel receipts for the recruitment team," the staff member who nominated them said. "Since this team has more travel than most of the Global Campus combined, it makes a huge difference. Kudos to them for coming up with an interim solution instead of waiting for Workday."

Workday is an enterprise resource planning system being implemented by the University of Arkansas system as a single system of record. Phase 1 of Workday includes finance and human resources information and is expected to replace BASIS on the Fayetteville campus in July 2020. Phase 2 of Workday will include student information management.

The Recruitment and Student Outreach Team supports academic colleges across campus. It includes the director, two recruiters, three online student liaisons who provide guidance through the application process, a digital outreach coordinator, a data analyst, and a manager of compliance and special projects.

The Global Campus instituted the Lightbulb Award to honor two or more staff members for outstanding innovation above and beyond their routine job responsibilities. This award is open to appointed and hourly staff.

"Global Campus has a strong commitment to continuous improvement," Milner said. "We are proud to have been able to implement a new process that improved communication and streamlined processing for both our traveling staff and the amazing staff who support our work every day."

The Global Campus supports U of A colleges and schools in the development and delivery of online, distance and workforce education programs and courses. It provides instructional design services, technology services and assistance with marketing, recruiting and strategic academic development.

The Global Campus also supports the W.E. Manning Memorial Scholarship, which is open to undergraduate and graduate students studying in online degree programs.